In many cases, each section of a character has several muscles. While you can provide an animator with many individual muscle controls and jiggle settings, it can also be useful to group muscles together with one overlying control to provide Jiggle, Cycle, and Rest values. This lets the animator control the Jiggle, Cycle, and Rest of an upper leg (for example), using only three attributes instead of several controls for each muscle in the leg.

The Setup Master Muscle Control window lets you create a Master Control object to hold all of the attributes, then sets up each of the chosen muscle controls to be driven by an expression from the master. Typically, muscle Jiggle can be offset from one muscle to another even in the same group. The script properly retains these offsets so that as the animator adjusts the master values, the same amount of offset per muscle is kept.

1. Create an object to be the Master Control. This object can be a group, a curve, or anything else that you want to hold the attributes.
   NoteYou cannot use any of the locator controls that are created automatically when you create a muscle as the Master Control object.

2. The following example uses a simple curve shape created by hand.

   

3. Select the object, then select Muscle > Muscles/Bones > Setup Master Muscle Control from the main menu bar.

   The Setup Master Muscle Control window appears.

4. Select the middle muscle controls on all of the muscles you want to control as a group. In general, you do not want to select the endpoints of the muscles, as they are already stable. In this example, we have selected the iControls of the upper leg muscles.
5. Click the load selection button next to the Controls area to load the muscle controls.
6. Select the Master Control object you created, then click the Master Control button to load the object into the window.
7. Specify a Name for this group of muscles. This name is used when the Master Control creates the attributes and expression.
   Tip -click the Name field to select preset naming conventions.

   

8. Click Setup Master Muscle Control. If the attributes needed did not yet exist on the Master Control, they are created and set to a default value based on the muscles.

   The Master Control is selected, and the attributes that display now control the whole group of muscles at once. In addition, the original iControls now have a different set of capitalized JIGGLE, CYCLE and REST attributes. These provide the animator with a way to offset the amount of each item from the Master Control.

   You can lock and hide the Translate, Rotate, and Scale attributes since they are not needed. Using the jiggle/cycle/rest attributes controls each of the original muscles.

9. You can repeat this process for other sections of the character, using the same Master Muscle Control for all of them.